The future of the suburb was built a century ago in vintage medieval style

In this photo, from Joe Shlabotnik’s photostream on Flickr, you can see the types of townhouses they have in the suburb of Forest Hills Garden, in Queens, New York. Based on the style, you’d never guess that it was part of a planned community, built using pre-fab concrete decades before anyone else thought to, right?

There’s a fascintating slideshow on Slate about Forest Hills Garden and how it came to be. It was ahead of its time — we’re just now starting to come back to its mixed-use, transit-oriented, walkable community plan. Says Slate:

Forest Hills has a variety of single-family houses: attached, semidetached, and freestanding. The aim of having many housing types was partly to give more choices to buyers and partly to create the kind of visual variety found in old towns. This is very different from the sort of homogeneity that characterizes most modern suburbs.

Homogeneity and, I would argue, soullessness.